You don’t need to go to Casselberry. A bedroom community of Orlando. Casselberry contains 20,000 people and at least as many strip shopping centers and franchise restaurants. If there is one place in Florida that can be said to embody urban hell, this is it.

But Casselberry is no sleepy hamlet. Robberies, including shoplifting, are up 270 percent since last year alone.

So it was business as usual when, on Aug. 1, at 4:40 p.m., the manager of the Eckerd drugstore in town called the police and reported nabbing a senior citizen for shoplifting.

According to store manager Teri Vargas, the woman had passed through the anti-theft device by the check-out counter when the alarm sounded. Vargas escorted her and an unidentified female companion, who had a large bag of items that had been bought, back into the store and had the woman walk through the device. The alarm sounded again.

Vargas asked her whether there was anything in her purse. While attempting to shield Vargas’ view with her body, she tried to drop a box of laxative into the bag held by the other woman. Vargas also noted that her purse contained a bottle of ophthalmic solution. “She was rather belligerent and did not want to come,” Vargas wrote in the police report.

The police were called and placed her under arrest. She was cooperative, gave her name as Hedy Maria Lamarr, her date of birth Nov. 9, 1914. She neither admitted nor denied taking the materials, whose value was $21.48. After the reports were filled out, she was released on the spot; because of the profusion of shoplifting arrests, the Casselberry police don’t have the time to book and photograph suspects at headquarters, while the suspects usually don’t have the bail money. “Besides,” says officer Dennis Stewart, “it’s bad P.R.”

The arresting officer, Richard Baldwin, is 24 years old. He didn’t know that the woman he had arrested used to be a famous movie star. A very famous movie star. *

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in either 1913 or 1914. Her fame, if not her career, was made when she appeared in 1933’s Ekstase, which featured both a nude swimming scene and a long, lingering close-up of Lamarr’s face as she experienced orgasm. In modern terms, it’s a soft-core movie that could run on late-night broadcast, but in 1933 it was next-door to a stag film. By 1938, she had divorced her first husband and landed in America, where she made Algiers, her first Hollywood film, opposite Charles Boyer.

The film spawned the catch phrase that 30 years of Boyer imitators belabored (“Come wiz me to de Casbah . . . “) and was an enormous hit. Throughout the war years, Lamarr was a major star, working opposite Clark Gable in Boom Town and Comrade X, John Garfield and Spencer Tracy in Tortilla Flat.

She was widely regarded as the most perfectly beautiful woman in the movies — her only real competition was Ava Gardner or depending on your taste, Rita Hayworth. But her beauty seemed impersonal, glacial, and nobody ever accused her of being a distinguished actress. There was a distinct falling off in the quality of her films after the war, mostly because popular taste began turning away from the studio-bound artificialities in which she had become famous, the only kind of films in which she could thrive.

She did not have a lot of close friends in the Hollywood community. Lazlo Willinger was among the best Hollywood portrait photographers of the studio era; his portraits of the MGM stars graced the fan magazines and Sunday supplements for years. Now, a portrait photographer has no heroes; because he had a comparatively low status, and they didn’t have to be nice to him, he saw the stars as they were. Some, he liked. Most, he didn’t.

According to Willinger: “Hedy Lamarr was bitchy and dumb and unbelievably beautiful. She was so perfect, you couldn’t take a bad portrait of her. And as long as she was beautiful, they used her. And, at the first wrinkle, she was out.”

A different Lamarr is remembered by Anne Hamilton, the mother of George Hamilton. Introduced to the star by a mutual acquaintance, the two women became fast friends. “She was not gregarious; she was basically a loner. Hedy was always completely unpretentious. She was usually alone when I saw her, which always dumbfounded me, because everybody in the world was dropping dead over her. She would talk about what hell it was, that people thought all it took was looks and money. ” Lamarr’s last hit was Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah in 1949 opposite Victor Mature, a film immortalized by Groucho Marx’s line that it was the first film he had ever seen where the leading man had a bigger chest than the leading lady. Those aren’t Marx’s exact words, but you get the idea.

Along the way, she married five more times, to an interesting assemblage of actors, producers and lawyers. By the mid-‘ 50s, Lamarr was relegated to European and American B movies, and she made her last picture in 1957. In 1966, she wrote her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, one of the first of the scandalous movie star tell-alls. Shortly after the publication of Ecstasy and Me, Lamarr was arrested on a shoplifting charge in Los Angeles. The illicit cargo amounted to $86. She went to trial and was acquitted. The fact that it was 25 years ago and in another state makes the charge completely irrelevant to the Casselberry incident; it cannot be introduced in court.

For a few years in the late `80s, Lamarr lived in Miami, until a robbery cost her most of her jewelry and frightened her to such an extent that she felt compelled to move to safer, more tranquil surroundings. For the past six months, that has meant Altamonte Springs, right next door to Casselberry, in a relentlessly middle-class condo development called Sandy Cove.

Her condo is about 150 yards from the Florida Eye Clinic, which specializes in the treatment of cataracts and glaucoma. She receives almost daily treatment for eye problems; she had cataract surgery as long ago as 1975.

There is nothing particularly wrong with Sandy Cove, understand, but you don’t expect to find a famous movie star living there, right around the corner from a Ponderosa Steak House. It’s as if, 30 years down the road, somebody notices Michelle Pfeiffer happily spending her declining years at Leisureville.

“I had no idea she was here until a reporter called me,” says Phil Penland, the city manager of Altamonte Springs and a neighbor of Lamarr’s at Sandy Cove. “She hasn’t made any hoopla at all. She never had an autograph session down at the clubhouse, if you know what I mean.”

Neighbors say she doesn’t venture out much during the day, but when she does, she always wears sunglasses and a hat. She enjoys relaxing at night in the condo hot tub.

Once the story hit the papers, Casselberry police were assailed by more than 200 phone calls from all over the world. Germany, France, Austria, Italy. They wanted to know whether she was a bag lady, whether she was in her right mind. Her family, in the person of her daughter Denise, says she has friends and money, has her life in order and simply forgot to hand in two items at the check-out counter.

Mostly, people were concerned that Hedy Lamarr was destitute. A half-dozen people wanted to pay her bill. But as the property had been returned to the store, there was no bill. There may, however, be a fine. She has been directed to appear in court Aug. 20 to answer charges of retail theft.

Lamarr faces a maximum penalty of a year in jail and/or $1,000 fine. The police have not been notified of her legal representation; a few days after the arrest, a letter came on official stationery that said the undersigned law firm was representing her. When the police contacted the firm in question, they said they knew nothing about it. *

The voice is old, a little tired, a little hesitant, but the gentle, fragrant Viennese accent marks it as unmistakably Hedy Lamarr’s. She seems weary, fretful and fragile. You want to soothe her, tell her it’s all right.

She has some trouble talking, she says, because she is laboring with the “Taiwan flu.” She came to Casselberry, she says, “to get away from the world.” And now the world is coming after her again. “Are people jealous or something? It makes me sick; it is so ridiculous.”

She remembers talking to Max Reinhardt once about her idea of luxury. It would be, she told him, to wake up with all the native clothes and food of whatever country she happened to be in. And Max Reinhardt said that in that case, she should try acting.

“And that led me to Hollywood,” she says, “which was only an illusion.”

Inevitably, the talk turns to the recent unpleasantness in Casselberry. “Certainly it was set up,” she says. “I had nothing; $8 in eye drops, and I couldn’t find the person with the cart. We were supposed to meet, and then this woman grabbed me. And now . . . ” She implies that the store personnel recognized her and fomented the arrest for the sake of publicity. She seems to summon confidence after a while. She says she has a good lawyer. “He owns most of Orlando.” After a while, she begs off, and says that her throat hurts and she can’t talk anymore.

Hedy Lamarr, an old woman with bad eyes who lives in Casselberry says good-bye but not before she thanks you for calling.

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